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45 years later, McCutcheon makes his debut in Auburn

John McCutcheon - a folksinger, storyteller, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist - has a a 7:30 p.m. show at Auburn Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 450 E. Thach Ave. It's part of the Sundilla Concert Series & Radio Hour.

On Friday, a road trip may be in order for a concert that’s been 45 years in the making.

John McCutcheon - a folksinger, storyteller, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist - has a a 7:30 p.m. show at Auburn Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 450 E. Thach Ave. It's part of the Sundilla Concert Series & Radio Hour.

“I’ve never played in Auburn, so this will be a debut,” said McCutcheon. "It’s an amazing kind of oversight that I’ve not been there, because I’ve been doing this for 45 years. You’d think that I’d eventually make it.”

McCutcheon said he’s really glad to be able to drive to Auburn, instead of having to take a flight. “It also means that I can throw some weird stuff in the back of the car that Delta Airlines won’t allow me to bring on board,” he said. "So who knows what I’ll show up with.”

Tickets for the show are $20 in advance at www.sundillamusic.com. On Friday, admission at the door will be $25.

With 39 albums done, and more on the way, what is McCutcheon going to sing Friday? Short of putting on a month-long concert, how do you pick a few songs out of 45 years for a single gig? He said there’s no telling what he’ll do. As a soloist, he doesn’t have to work off a set list.

"I’ll probably pick just whatever I feel like doing for the first set,” said McCutcheon. "At the end of the first set, what I frequently do is encourage people during intermission to leave requests up on the stage. I really have no idea why people come to my shows.”

Friday’s audience could dictate the rest of the show.

"There are some people who come because eight of those 39 albums are albums I wrote for kids and families, when my own kids were growing up. There’re some people who only know me by those albums,” said McCutcheon. "There are some people who only know me as a hammer dulcimer player. There are some who only know me as a singer/songwriter. There are some people who only know me as a big champion of fiddle and banjo music. And they’re all right. I love all that stuff, and all that stuff shows up in my shows. But I don’t know what they came really hoping to hear, and I want to make sure people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.”

Folk singer, storyteller, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon has a show Friday in Auburn.(Photo: Irene Young/Contributed)

His work in folk music has drawn a connection between McCutcheon and the late folk music legend Woody Guthrie, who most everyone knows from the song “This Land Is Your Land." There’s a good reason for the comparison.

“I grew up musically, figuratively at (Guthrie’s) knee,” said McCutcheon, a native of Wisconsin. "I got a guitar for my 14th birthday and I went down to our public library. My parents didn’t have any money to pay for music lessons, so I went to the library to find a book on how to play guitar. The only thing that the Dewey Decimal system led me to was a book called Woody Guthrie Folk Songs. I didn’t know who he was, but there was a page of those guitar chord grids in the front and about 50 or 60 songs. I said perfect. I can learn how to play guitar from this book. So it was kind of kismet, I guess, that had me start off with Woody Guthrie.”

McCutcheon even did an album in honor of Guthrie’s 100th birthday. "He wrote about everything, and he wasn’t afraid to stick his neck out,” said McCutcheon. "He also never forgot where he was from or who he was singing for. That was real powerful lessons for me."

Folk music is probably the most broadly defined music we have, with everything from mountain dulcimers to bluegrass, and everything in between, McCutcheon said.

“Folk music is the root of all the world’s music. Everything goes back to that,” McCutcheon said. "It all came back to that kind of lyrical, story-based song about the tribe.”

McCutcheon’s journey into folk music didn’t stop with guitar. Like I said, he’s a multi-instrumentalist. One that really caught his interest was the banjo, which he started playing in college.

"I convinced my advisor to let me travel around and study with old banjo players,” said McCutcheon. "It’s a three-month independent study that I’m still on 45 years later.”

So does the banjo get a bad rap?

“Yeah, of course it does,” McCutcheon said with a laugh. “Some of it is deserved. When I started doing this 45 years ago, the ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ were still on TV. ‘Deliverance’ was in the movie theaters. ‘Li’l Abner’ was there. ‘Hee Haw’ was on television. It was a lot of playing to stereotypes. I loved the people that I was learning the music from too much to put my tongue in my cheek when I played. This was music I truly loved, and I presented it that way. People might start off thinking that what they’re going to hear is some kind of caricature of hill folk, but people who know hill folk know that that’s just a caricature."

His most recent album “Ghost Light” is his 39th, and McCutcheon said it was accidental.

“My previous album was called ‘Trolling for Dreams.’ It had some of the best reviews of my career. So I thought, well, I’m going to ride that out for a while, because I know in 2018 I want to be working on this album in honor of Pete Seeger’s 100th birthday, which is in 2019,” McCutcheon said. "This is how you have to do it, a year in advance, just to make sure it gets out on time."

McCutcheon runs summer songwriting camps. During one of them, he gave his students advice on how to go home and write on their own. To pick a date, sit down and write, and resolve to do it for so many days in a row. He followed his own advice.

“This line came to me. ‘Billy didn’t come home last night.’ And I thought, ‘Who’s Billy? What happened to him? Where’d he go? Why didn’t he come home?’ I’ve been doing this long enough to know how fickle the Muse is, so I sat down with her and ended up writing a song.”

He wrote another one the next day, and the next, and the next. “It just kept going for about 25 days. I ended up with 30 new songs.”

Putting out an album became a necessity for him then. It was a “beautiful accident.”

“It’s all over the map, subject wise,” said McCutcheon.

The one exception is his song “The Machine,” which he’d already written in connection to violence in Charlottesville, N.C. The song also continues his link to Guthrie and the guitar Guthrie played that carried a message, "This machine kills fascists."

“I lived in Charlottesville for 20 years, so I wrote something about it," said McCutcheon. "I was recording a demo of it in-between cutting tracks for the rest of the album. Everybody said, woah, let’s do that one."

He's working on his 40th album right now, and said he talked about it with his wife. “She said, ‘How long does it take to make back your money?’ And I said, a lot longer than it used to. And a lot of people never make it back. She said, ‘Well, why do you do it then?’ I said that it’s what we do. We write these songs and I still believe in the album format, the ability of a collection of songs to tell the story that’s greater than the sum of its parts.”

On the longterm project side, McCutcheon said that one day he is going to write a mass. “If you look at the classical world, all the heavy hitters wrote masses,” he said.

He’s done a variety already, including an all-baseball album about 10 years ago. In fact, he’s friends with another singer, songwriter, storyteller and baseball fan Montgomery may remember. Chuck Brodsky paid the River Region a visit last year for a concert at the Advertiser and a night of baseball with the Biscuits.

“I know Chuck really well,” said McCutcheon. "In fact, Chuck and I do an opening day show every year. We’re both baseball nuts and we love one another.”